Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Presentism

I was spending some time over the past couple of days looking at articles about the late David Bowie. Most of them concentrated on his career in both music and film. Most didn't bother me because although I wasn't a big fan of his, I understood his importance. Unfortunately, there have been a spate of what I call chickenshit articles and blog posts by so-called feminists, who engage in something called "presentism" and say that Bowie doesn't deserve all of the praise because he had sex with underage groupies long ago.

Oh, the horror! I can about bet that 99 percent of these dingbats calling themselves feminists weren't even alive when all of that freewheeling crap went on in the 1960s and 1970s. This was not at all similar to the Bill Cosby mess, where the women were slipped drugs or were harassed and didn't consent to anything. These groupies went after these older rockers, and, being men, they reciprocated in kind. None of them carded these young women. Statutory rape laws were hardly ever enforced, and they would typically be used if a parent got upset about his or her daughter's relationship with an older man (boys usually weren't involved with much-older women).

And then some of these idiot bloggers and writers made the same ludicrous claim about Elvis Presley and Priscilla Beaulieu without checking any sources. I am not referring to the Currie Grant bullshit, bullshit that got him sued by Priscilla, which isn't reliable. The truth was the relationship was not consummated until they were married in 1967 and is completely consistent with the way Elvis was with women he cared about. Priscilla was well past the "age of consent" by then. Elvis knew better because of what had happened with Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, with big scandals over Berry's violating the Mann Act and Lewis marrying his 13-year-old cousin. But hey, all of these men were pedophiles.

The only "moral" rock star during that period in terms of sexual conduct was Pat Boone, and he was 1950s. Hell, he went so far as to refuse to kiss an actress onscreen in any movie he was in because he wanted to be completely faithful to his wife.

It would nice if these birdbrained, self-styled "feminists" would actually hit the dictionary and know what "pedophilia" is. Hint: It doesn't involve young people who have attained puberty.

Anyway, I loathe "presentism." Taking the way things were decades ago and then feign outrage and distort what happened to fit modern sensibilities is total dishonesty.

The most infamous example of presentism is all of the bullshit surrounding the dropping of the atom bomb on the Japanese. You would think, to read the bullshit which often emanates from the so-called "left," that the United States was the villain and Japan was this innocent country full of lovable people. Never mind Pearl Harbor and suicide missions.

That always pissed me off because I always regarded it as a pack of lies to further an agenda.